Japanese telco SoftBank has confirmed the acquisition of Sprint and it appears that the US telco will set it back about $20.1 billion.

Apparently, both SoftBank and Sprint are ranked third in their own markets and the new company will look to change that. The deal is expected to be done and dusted in 2013, making the new Sprint a force to be reckoned with and have the third largest mobile service in the world.

According to the deal, SoftBank will buy $8 billion worth of new shares and $12.1 billion in existing ones. This will earn it 70 percent stake in Sprint.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse described the deal as “transformative transaction” for the company. He also said that Sprint’s “management team is excited to work with SoftBank to learn from their successful deployment of LTE in Japan as we build out our advanced LTE network, improve the customer experience and continue the turnaround of our operations.”

Sources are now confirming to us that Polish developer People Can Fly (which are developers of Bulletstorm and the upcoming Gears of War: Judgment) have been purchased by Epic Games. The news comes just hours after news of three key members of the People Can Fly team elected to depart to pursue other opportunities.

Adrian Chmielarz, Andrzej Poznanski and Michal Kosieradzki are three key players that left People Can Fly prior to the news that it had been acquired by Epic. Little is known about the impact that the departures will have in both the long term and the short term, but the three were a significant driving force inside the studio. Epic has been quoted as saying that they will be helping and working with Chmielarz again. Chmielarz was the founder of People Can Fly.

Epic apparently has always wanted to acquire People Can Fly, so the move isn’t totally unexpected, according to a source claiming to know the situation.

Social news site Digg.com signed over the company to Betaworks, for $500,000.

Digg was once the belle of the social notworking world and tipped to be as popular as Facebook. Lately it has had a lot of problems and even its founder Kevin Rose has jumped ship to join Google.

Betaworks will have its own founder John Borthwick becoming the new CEO of Digg while current CEO Matt Williams is downgraded to Entrepreneur in Residence. Digg has tried many things in the past few months and the only way it can continue is if it is under another company. Matt Williams said that he has been scratching his head for ideas and many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place.

Digg was supposed to be a way to discover the best stuff on the web. Betaworks said that it will “build Digg for 2012.” Digg’s current employees seem to be left with News.me’s current team will be taking over the digital management of Digg.com while a new “cloud-based version of Digg” will work with News.me iPhone and iPad apps.

Hot on the heels of the announcement of its new toy, Surface, Microsoft has bought manufacturer of large touch displays Perceptive Pixel.

Microsoft did not say much of the terms of the acquisition. However, the company said that the purchase should offer up new possibilities for its vendor partners. Namely, Microsoft’s president of the office division Kurt DelBene has revealed that the large touch displays will be combined with OEM hardware to make “powerful Windows 8-based PCS”.

Naturally, with the announcement of Surface, the time is ripe to get the rumor mill up and running, and quite rightfully so. Despite what Microsoft would have the public think, announcing Surface and buying a large touch display maker afterwards suggests we may see a mega-Surface or something along those lines.

Seeing as how Microsoft primarily focused on software solutions, the purchase will definitely make its job easier, at least on the touch panel front. The deal is pending regulatory approval.

AMD announced that it completed the acquisition of SeaMicro Inc, a company that specializes in energy-efficient and high bandwidth microservers. The deal saw AMD splash out $334 million. SeaMicro will now become AMD’s Data Center Solutions business.

AMD claims that the acquisition will “accelerate its strategy to deliver disruptive server technology and provide its customers serving Cloud-centric data centers with highly-differentiated AMD-based solutions beginning this year.” AMD claims it has thus armed itself with the tools needed to attack the fastest growing portion of the server market.

It's pretty clear that AMD isn’t planning on taking it easy, since it clearly said “beginning this year”. So, now we wait.

Intel is betting big on the future of human interfaces with a $21 million investment in Tobii, a Swedish company that has been working for years on eye-tracking laptops and other devices.

The news, announced by co-founder and VP John Elvesjö comes on the heels of Tobii’s newest eye-tracking device, which was announced a week ago at CeBit. Elvesjö said that the cunning plan was always to test its technology small scale in laptops and then expand into larger markets like cars and mobile phones.

Eye-tracking is a influential feature that could grow in value. Tobii technology has already been showing how it can control Windows 8 via eye-tracking.

Tobii is unprofitable and 2010 saw a $3.5M loss. Its new eye-tracker is smaller and cheaper and draws less power than its predecessor. It can even be embedded.

Intel has bought the mobile navigation software maker Telmap, writing a cheque for between $300 and $350 million.

Telmap CEO Oren Nissim said the deal would close before the end of the year. It would see Telmap will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel.

Nissim told Reuters that it was jolly nice when a giant and says "We really like what you're doing, we believe in your strategy, we want to enhance and go forward." Which is odd really because that is not what Jonah said when he was eaten up, nor any of Jaws' victims.

He said that teaming up with Intel will enable Telmap to provide a "true alternative" to offerings from giants such as Nokia and Google. Intel said that Telmap will become much bigger and reach places it hasn't before. This includes Europe, Asia-Pacific or the United States. The company will remain based in Israel.

Google has finally become a hardware manufacturer. It wanted to become Apple for years and after two more or less failed attempts with Nexus phones, they realized that the best way to compete with Apple is to acquire a shaken up but well known business.

As of today, Motorola mobile belongs to Google and Google has cashed out $40.00 per share in cash, total of about $12.5 billion, a premium of 63% to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday, August 12, 2011. This kind of overpricing still sounds better than 8.5 billion what Microsoft spent to acquire Skype.

Apple will get some decent competition and despite the fact that Google claims that Motorola Mobility will remain a separate company, you cannot shake the thought that new Motorola mobiles will have a huge advantage over anyone else.

Of course, many vendors got scared, and it was funny and sad at the same time to read the official comments. You can read them below but you can imagine even from these few lines, how “thrilled” everyone is.

You have to have in mind that Motorola produced some very memorable members of the tech society, including Hector Ruiz and the equally successful Motorola Xoom. Google can do quite ok with this wireless business and in we got things right, Google will start looking in wireless provides to complete the dominance. Of course, despite a string of largely unsuccesful products in recent years, Motorola still has quite a few valuable patents and know-how. This is what Google might be after in the long run.

HTC has an agreement with Via Technology to buy its S3 Graphics technology. The deal will cost the Taiwanese company $300 million and will mean that HTC will have proprietary hardware technology to equip their smartphones, and tablets.

Via Technology, for its part, will continue to use its patents to develop and market new solutions on the market. Of the 300 million dollars, 147 and 153 will go to Via Technology to WTI International Investment which is an investment company.

Dr. Ken Weng, CEO of S3 Graphics said that S3 Graphics’ technology has been implemented in more than one billion computers, game consoles and mobile devices worldwide.” S3 Graphics is a private company owned by VIA Technology.

The proposed transaction has received approvals from the boards of directors of HTC, WTI and VIA. Subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions, the transaction is expected to close before end of 2011.

Auctioneers Ebay has said that it will write a cheque for $2.4 billion for GSI Commerce.

The outfit runs websites for retailers like Toys R Us and Bath & Body Works. EBay hopes the sale will help it become more of a threat to Amazon.com.

GSI is pretty big. It runs websites, packs and ships products and offers interactive marketing services to a variety of retailers. It has long-term contracts with 180 retailers, including Radio Shack, Ace Hardware and American Eagle Outfitters. EBay has been working on improving its eBay.com website by doing things such as revamping its home page, cutting upfront listing fees it charges sellers and bolstering its search engine.

The $2.4 billion total is the second-largest amount eBay has paid for another company thus far. In 2005 eBay paid $2.6 billion for Internet calling and messaging service Skype, which it has since flogged off.

As part of the acquisition, eBay plans to sell GSI's licensed sports merchandise business and 70 percent of shopping sites RueLaLa.com and ShopRunner.com. EBay hopes to complete the deal by the end of the year.